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The health services of the richer countries are hugely dependent on nurses and doctors from developing countries, attracted by better salaries and the higher standard of living. James Johnson, Head of the British Medical Association (BMA), says that it's

Transcript

Male: Midnight, March 6, 1957 Independence. Ghana belongs to herself. Schools, clinics -- Narrator: That future wasn’t always smooth. Since independence, Ghana’s had a mixed history; four republics, four military regimes plus several foiled coups. Economically, there was uneven progress. In the late 1990s, the bottom dropped out of two key exports, gold and cocoa. But in the last five years, Ghana’s economy has started to improve. Jeffrey Sachs: Ghana is by everybody’s account a relatively well governed country in the world, yet it’s impoverished and it’s facing many of the aspects of poverty traps that engulf its neighbors and most of Africa and many other parts of the word, and the drain of skilled labor especially in the health sector is one of those traps. Narrator: For over 40 years, there’s been a trickle of Ghanaian nurses to the English-speaking developed world. One widely quoted source says almost 2,000 nurses left Ghana between 1995 and 2002. And the exodus is set to continue as nurses opt to leave a crumbling health system to earn more abroad. In the UK, some nurses can earn more in a day than they could in a month back home. Professor Abyeman Badu Akosa: Nurses we have of the order of about 8000 and this includes professional and non-professional. So, we are not doing well at all, and it’s all because we train our human resource, train them to a very high standard, and why not? And because the systems in country are not attractive enough, the health workers leave this country for pastures new and hat is the problem. It’s a very big problem. James Johnson: It's the major medical problem facing the world today by a long way. It costs £220,000.00 in this country to produce a doctor, £12,500.00 to produce a nurse. We can afford it, even though it’s expensive; they can’t afford it, and to expect developing countries to spend part of their tiny amount of money producing doctors and nurses to work in our health service, in the American health service, is quite immoral. Narrator: In 2003, 43% of nurses registering to work in Britain were trained abroad compared with just 10% a decade earlier. Lydia Kwashie left Ghana early in 2004 to work as a carer in a private NHS nursing home in Sheffield. Lydia Kwashie: Back home, you can work for a whole lot of years, 20 years, 25 years, and you go home with nothing, no house, nothing, not even a bicycle. I’m just here one year, four months. I have my own accommodation. I’m working. I have a car. Back home I couldn’t. I couldn’t even go near a car tyre, and ask “How much is this tyre?” Evelyn Sowah: What eventually dragged me out of the country was, if sometimes you see some of our the sisters, the senior sisters who are in retirement and some of them just go and within a year or two, they are dead. When you look at them, it’s like you don’t have a future. Lydia Kwashie: We feel guilty, very, very guilty, but there is nothing we can do. You have children. You have family. You leave them, you look back, you are crying, they are also crying but you have to leave them. Why? Because you can’t do anything. Major Courage Quashigah: We are concerned. We raised the issue at the World Health Assembly recently, very vehemently, that the World Health Organization should do something about it to save the developing countries from losing their professionals to developed countries we thought it was totally immoral. Narrator: Life traveled with Lydia back to Accra, Ghana’s capital city and to Korle Bu, the premier teaching hospital where Lydia trained. The aim is to find out why nurses are leaving and meet some of the people Lydia left behind.